Social media applications and tools.

November 22, 2016

Twitter has finally got around to providing people with a way of muting words that they don't want to see. This allows you to filter out potentially disturbing content that you don't wish to see. You can mute specific words, phrases, usernames emojis or hashtags. When you do this, you won't see any new notifications for tweets that contain them. It's an easy process.

Go to your Twitter account, and choose notifications.

Then choose settings

This will open up the following dialogue box:

Then click on 'Mute specific words from your notifications' and type in the words that you want to mute.

September 23, 2016

Use fllwrsto monitor changes in your Twitter followers over time and keep a history of followers that have been lost or added. Would you like to see a record of who follows and unfollows you every day? Would you like to get notified when someone unfollows you?

February 01, 2016

Hunting around the net I've found a few new tools that you might want to try out if you're well into Twitter.

Life on Twitter will take a look at about 1,000 tweets and will tell you things like who your best friend is, which days you tweet on most, most used hashtags, influencers, most popular tweets. I'm a bit doubtful about some of the information it came back with but it only took a couple of seconds, so it was of mild interest.

Tall Tweets allows you to write tweets that are longer than 140 characters. You can write out your message and the service will chop it into appropriate sizes and then post them in order. I'd be irritated by this to be honest, and I really would think twice about following someone who did it on a regular basis. However, your call!

Spruce. Very simple - choose an image, choose some words, put the two together and tweet it.

Twitter Archiver lets you easily save tweets for any keyword/hashtag in a Google Spreadsheet. Enter a search query/hashtag and all matching tweets are saved on the Google sheet. You can run Boolean searches as well as advanced Twitter searches.

Twitter RSS Feeds. The link goes to a page that gives an excellent step by step guide on how to create an RSS feed.

Crowdfire is a great tool. It will tell you who you follow who doesn't follow you back, recent unfollowers/followers, people you're following who are inactive, all following (oldest first) and so on. It works automatically and takes only a few seconds.

Tweriod tells you when most of your followers are awake and active, thus informing you of the best time to tweet. For example, for me most people are active at about 3pm on weekdays, then at 6pm, and a few less at about 1pm at the weekend, while during the week, 11 am, peaking at 2pm, and then another smaller peak at 4pm.

Twipho (Twitter photos) is a search engine that just pulls back images that relate to a specific hashtag. I really like this tool - it's simple and easy to use.

Curate your followers tweets into a magazine style format with Instacurate or Vellum. On the whole I preferred the latter, but it was harder to read, though more comprehensive.

(With thanks to Digital Inspiration for the list; go and visit the page since there are many more than I chose to include.)

February 23, 2015

One of the things that a lot of people ask me when they come on Twitter training sessions is 'can we all use the same account?' The answer to that is 'technically yes' - share the user name and password. The problem with that approach however is that someone is going to leave the password out on a post-it note somewhere, or a team member will leave, which means everyone has to learn a new password.

Twitter is now rolling out the ability to create team accounts, with a single Account Manager who knows the password, and s/he can then add team members, and assign them particular roles, such as the ability to tweet, retweet, delete, follow, unfollow and so on. If a team member leaves, they can be removed from the account without the need to create a new password.

The main, indeed the only drawback that I can see is that everyone has to be using Tweetdeck for this to work. Tweetdeck is owned by Twitter, so I guess that it's a move on their part to try and wean people away from clients such as Hootsuite.

August 26, 2014

If you're wondering why you want to follow lots of people on Twitter and Facebook then Nuzzel will give you a good answer. Give it details of your social media accounts and it will then go off and find out which stories are catching fire in your network, giving you the chance to make sure that you're fully caught up with them. If you're short on time, this is a great tool to use.

If you want to publish an RSS feed directly to Twitter, then you might want to explore Twibble. Simply choose the feeds that you're interested in, and Twibble will do the rest for you - you can schedule the tweets to go out when you want, and it will also add in any images as well. It seems to be free, although there was an indication that it might go commercial at some point.

August 12, 2014

Twipho is a twitter photo search service. They find images on any search terms that you care to try. This does include adult material: I did a quick check, and there's no filtering option and no safe mode that I could see which does rather limit its use in for example a school environment. Consequently, don't just hit the 'search' box when it's empty, since they'll give you a random selection which could include NSFW material.

However, you can explore using keywords, locations and people to view images you'd normally never see. It's a really useful way to find images of whatever is in the news at the moment, and of course, once you've viewed the image you can click through to the original tweet.

There are lots of Twitter tools, and most of them are fairly underwhelming, but I'm very impressed with Twtrland. It's a free tool, and you just need to register and authorise it with Twitter, and once you've done that you get a whole host of really interesting information.

The overview of your profile tells you what your daily Twitter activity is, your popularity (tweet and RT ratio), and how communicative you are. There's a list of the main people that you interact with on Twitter, your most popular tweets and some key followers.

You can see an analysis of your account; audience, activity, amplification and engagement. There are some interesting insights - my tweets are generally seen by about 1, 011 people on average, out of a total of just under 9K followers. I also share about 14 links a week, and just under half of my tweets are replies to other people.

Followers is another useful category, and you can see who follows you, if they are celebrities, power users, casual or novice, and where they're from country wise. I can also quickly see who I spend most time in conversation with.

Demographics is based on your first 5K followers - if you have more, or want them all to be covered, you can pay for the professional version. However, you can see what the male/female ratio is (mine is 38% male, 62% female), age range, locations and cities. You can also see a couple of audience interests (mine are libraries and librarians) but you have to pay to see more.

You can also share your profile, so if you want to take a look and see what mine looks like, you're most welcome to. In summary, it's a nice tool, lots of interesting stuff, and if you want to know more about how your Twitter account ticks, this is a good tool to play with.

MyTopTweet.com analyzes any Twitter account to show you their most retweeted tweets. They look at the past 3200 tweets sent by the account to show you their top 10 tweets. It does the job quickly and efficiently.